I spoke to Dell on the phone yesterday about buying a second hard drive. When I told him I wanted to use it for a second OS he brought up an interesting point (to me, anyway). What if 98SE is not compatible with all the drivers that are set for XP: video/audio, monitor, printer, etc?

tuesday next

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'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe.

What I was attempting to say was that if the hardware is too new and the manufacturers of the hardware no longer produce 98SE drivers, there is no point in installing a separate hard drive with 98SE. The video, audio, printer, scanner, mouse, etc. won't work. Not because of the XP drivers but because there are no 98SE drivers available.

Before going any further, it might be an idea to track down all the websites of all the hardware manufacturers whose hardware is in your XP system and see if they are still producing 98SE drivers for the hardware you have. If they aren't, the game is over.

Yup, you need to make sure you have all the needed drivers before you install any Operating System. Let's see, you'll need video card drivers, sound card drivers, printer drivers, maybe modem drivers, maybe ethernet (NIC) card drivers, motherboard chip set drivers, etc. It's hard for me to imagine that these aren't available for Win98, except maybe the motherboard chipset drivers. Motherboard chipset drivers are easy to overlook, but make a big difference. They include things like IDE bus mastering drivers. Your computer *should* work without them, but they DO make a difference.

Sorry TuesdayNext, I was busy yesterday and didn't check in. What Mr. Lipid said. You need to know what kind of motherboard you have, unless it's a brand name computer like Dell. Then you might get by with knowing the model number of the computer. Then go to the manufacturer's web site (motherboard or system as needed) and look for downloads in their tech support section. It should be pretty straight forward.